The memorial captures the brutality and the scale of lynchings throughout the South, where more than 4,000 black men, women and children, died at the hands of white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Most were in response to perceived infractions -- walking behind a white woman, attempting to quit a job, reporting a crime or organizing sharecroppers.
Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard University-trained lawyer who created the
Equal Justice Initiative in 1994 to fight for justice for people on death row, found himself transfixed by the South's history of lynching African Americans.
Stevenson and a team of researchers spent years documenting those lynchings, combing through court records and local newspapers -- which often notified the public that a lynching was coming -- and talking to local historians and family members of victims.
Naming the victims
Their findings yielded a roll call of names that have never had a place in the public memory or the public accounting of what happened:
General Lee, lynched in 1904, for knocking on a white woman's door in Reevesville, South Carolina.
Jeff Brown, lynched in 1916, for accidentally bumping into a white girl as he was trying to catch a train in Cedarbluff, Mississippi.
Sam Cates, lynched in 1917, for "annoying white girls" in England, Arkansas.
Jesse Thornton, lynched in 1940, for failing to address a police officer as "mister," in Luverne, Alabama.
"If I asked the question, "Name one African American lynched between 1877 and 1950," Stevenson said, most people can't name one person. "Thousands of black people were lynched. Can't name one. Why?"
"Because we haven't talked about it," he said. "And there are names that we can call from history for all of these other things. But not that."
